Moksa - Tender, Spicy, Meaty

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Moksa - Tender, Spicy, Meaty

I finally got a chance to try this "pan-Asia fusion" place and was pleasantly surprised. My DC and I traditionally have awful luck in restaurants; our presence together somehow seems to stir up the cosmos such that nearly every restaurant meal we've had together has been memorably bad. Not this time! Oddly, Moksa seems to get a fair amount of mediocre reviews in Yelp. Maybe that's the key.

Moksa is nestled away on Mass Ave in Central Square next to the theater. It's a sparsely decorated industrial-looking space, but it doesn't really feel cold the way a lot of modern places do. There's a club in the back.

We ordered various items and split them. The menu is in the form of small plates.

-Beef tongue on a stick. Delightful! This has become my #2 beef tongue preparation, with #1 being the beef tongue listed on the Toraya specials menu. Tender and juicy slabs, the tongue has a cumin-y flavor, and is served atop a drizzle of horseradish sauce.

-Silk Road Meatballs. Lamby, spicy, minty, meatbally-goodness.

-Uiygur Lamb. Definitely a "Must-get" dish. A cereal bowl full of tender chunks of lamb, with such a delightfully spicy (but not too hot) underlying cumin burn, stir fried with veggies and "gnocchi", which were actually the oval discs of rice cake (duk). The duk missed the mark, however, as it was overboiled and gummy. We ended up leaving a big bowl of gummy duk, with most of the meat plucked out with our chopsticks.

-Shao Bing with Red Cooked Pork. Red cooked pork is one of my all-time favorite dishes; this version came in the form of a McGriddle-looking sandwich, panini-pressed complete with slotted grill marks. It was excellent. It had a strong star-anise flavor but it wasn't greasy and adipose like many RCP preparations.

The table next to us reported that they tried many of the grilled skewer items, and reported that the duck breast was their favorite. I'll have to try that, because I certainly will be going back to this place.